More granular application visibility and control features, including IPv6 bridged flows, IP aware MPLS NetFlow in hardware on Sup2T, medianet metadata, and hierarchical shaping and queuing, which together improve performance, user experience, and monitoring.

Resiliency improvements to optimize business continuity, including several non-stop forwarding, stateful switchover, and graceful restart features.

Cisco Catalyst SmartOperations features to lower operating costs, including the ability of the Catalyst 6500 to serve as a Smart Install Director, dramatically simplify the deployment of downstream switches by controlling Cisco IOS Software images and configurations.